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The weak link in the accident chain: the driver

According to the Final Report of the eSafety Working Group (November 2002), most accidents (about 75%) are caused only by human errors, in 95% human errors were involved. There are about 40.000 fatal accidents on Europe's roads each year. It is the ambition of the European Union to decrease this number by one half until the year 2010. However, regarding the road accident scenario in Europe two basic facts have to be realised.

• There is no technology that can reduce the number of road accident fatalities by 2010 by half.
• It is not the technology that is responsible for serious accidents. It is the driver.

This is corroborated by the fact that today’s control systems react and master system usage more precisely, faster and more reliably then any human can be expected to do. On average the human body stops operation with a probability of about 10-6 per hour of operation (this corresponds to a 52 year old person).

Nevertheless, the accident rate is unacceptably high and has to be reduced. It is clear that the driver, as the weak link in the accident chain, has to be supported in his driving task. SPARC wants to achieve this on three complementary levels.

Improvement of the HMI and powertrain

First by improved conditioning of the driver through improvements in the human machine interface (HMI) and by evaluating the driver state (for example sleepiness, drowsiness). Second by supporting the driver by safety assistance systems, which actively intervene before dangerous situations occur. And third by putting a desired and safe action securely on the road via the powertrain.

At present the first two aspects are the subject of intensive research and major activities are being proposed / launched for the EU 6th Framework Programme by the integrated projects PReVENT and AIDE.

State of the art driver assistance systems are based on the analysis of the direct vehicle environment or near by traffic using sensors based on radar, lidar, and vision systems. First steps are under discussion and/or undertaken to support the driver in situations where it can be uniquely determined that a dangerous situation has developed and that no reaction by the driver has been initiated.

HMI issues have been addressed by IST projects such as COMUNICAR and EDEL. So far, however, the HMI results have not yet yielded in systems for practical use, and they usually are limited to user warnings. Furthermore it has to be noted that due to product liability issues the systems cannot be marketed as accident prevention systems but rather as comfort systems or at most as collision mitigation systems.

The current state of the art in x-by-wire research is represented by the PEIT project (IST project IST–2000–28722: Powertrain Equipped with Intelligent Technologies). PEIT develops a powertrain architecture that enables a fully redundant electronic control of a vehicle by a general data interface using a motion (or drive) vector.

Work in all of the above issues is needed in order to achieve a significant contribution to decrease road accidents in Europe.

for information about PEIT see www.eu-peit.net